Ask HN: How can I come to peace with the years I wasted on pointless things?

My therapist says it's important to accept my personal story of how I came to be here. Sometimes that means grieving all the missed opportunities from the past. It's important to integrate the past into the present so you can confidently move into the future. Just make sure that you are a friend to yourself as you take stock of your past. YMMV.

Assuming you successfully did the hard work above, or have opted to skip it... Let's think about the future. Try to imagine where you want to be in 5 or 10 years. What does that look like? Is it an accomplishment? A style of living? A feeling? Freedom? Think however makes sense to you as we all have different sense of what we want. That's your end point that you'll try to target. Try to think of what would have to happen each year, each month, each week to get there. How can you do that sustainably? This is a type of thinking that may be helpful to you.

In my opinion it's good that you're auditing yourself like this. Maybe you don't really want to be doomscrolling your life away. But the hard question to answer is where do you want to turn your attention? What is important to you?

Hope some of this helps.

Wasted time? Try feeling like your prime years were wasted on repeat trips to Afghanistan and Iraq. Maybe I helped at least one person. Maybe they’re long dead. At least I got to come back.

However, now I have a wife and kids who adore me. I get things done that other people find useful. I’m active and close with extended family. Things are pretty good, no regrets. Thinking about it, I’d do it all again.

Point is, worrying about what you could have done is wasted energy. Accept where you are and make a plan for where you want to be. Realize that after you’re gone, the likelihood of people remembering you outside of those you touched is small.

I guess the first thing to note is that in a hundred and fifty years, you'll be dead and unless you're one in a million or maybe ten million, nobody alive will know you existed. So it's not a competition, there's no prize ceremony at the end for the guy who did the most stuff, there's no one way you should be living your life.

The second thing is, the past is dead and gone. You can't do anything about it. You can learn to let go of it or you can let it consume your present and deny you whatever future you're trying to make for yourself. There is only now.

Third, you've got to make time to do the things that you enjoy; unless studying computer science is the thing that you enjoy most in the world, you're going to be miserable if you don't do some other stuff. Carmack and Romero spent all their spare time writing code because that's what they loved to do. If that's what you loved to do, you'd have been doing the same thing.

Finally, you're still very young. You have many years ahead of you and what you think will be fulfilling will change, probably more than once. Your life will not turn out how you think it will. That's fine, that's just the way it goes.

That's all I have.

I think you should make peace with yourself. At the time, it was the right thing to do (even if you think the complete opposite now), and you did it. Learn from it, consider everything as an experience, and keep doing what you love. 23 is nothing, you have plenty of time ahead and many people start their lifelong hobbies/passions at a later age anyway.

Nothing is wasted. You enjoyed your time playing WoW, and now you want to try other hobbies, go on and try them! Whatever you do, don't consider anything in the past as "wasted".

do not regret my friend. as others have said, you have already taken the first step, which is to recognize that something needs to be changed. but you will later thank your past experiences, believe me. i spent 10+ years playing quake world, more than 5h/day and i am very grateful for that period, because it was my first contact with some kind of programming, i made my best friends at that time there and got fluent in english. despite the enormous amount of time spent, I do not regret that period, in fact, I am very grateful for it to have happened